I've spent a few weeks now looking at the Ruby on Rails open-source web framework.

Ruby in itself has existed for about 10 years. It is an intuitive language that is pretty easy to learn. It's often possible to guess at how something new should work and be right.

Ruby on Rails is a web framework that's written in Ruby. There have been many attempts to clone Rails in other languages like Perl, Lisp, Python, and PHP.

I've followed a couple of the tutorials and have just started working on a couple new applications using RoR. I'm posting the resources and tutorials I've been using here so that those of you who are so inclined may follow along and give this interesting language a look.

Getting Ruby on Rails:Installing Ruby, Gems, and Rails
Be sure to follow the link in step 2 to get GemRails installed.
Many of the tutorials explain how to the the built in web server in Rails, so you won't need to bother with the apache configuration until you're concerned about performance.

Tutorials:How to make a todo list program with Rails 0.9
This is the first tutorial that I followed. It's pretty simple and glosses over a lot of the specifics of the language, but you can get a good feel for how it all hooks together, and the general processes for building an application. Shouldn't take more than an hour if you're paying attention.How to make a todo list program with Rails
Another version of the same tutorial. I'm not sure if there are differences in the content.

Rolling with Ruby on Rails
Very windows centered complete with windows installation and GUI tools, but still worth a read. I didn't follow this tutorial, but I did read through it, skipping the boring bits about windows.

Wiki Tutorial
This is the wiki tutorial, and is a work in progress. It's a quick tutorial, but isn't as detailed as I'd like.

That should do it, and shouldn't affect any of your launchers or file associations.

[update] It appears that you may need the compat libs for this to work. If you use a package manager, search for 'compat' and you should find something like compat-libstdc++ or libstdc++-compat. If you install them FF should be happy.